Michael: Okay, Kevin. You've read the book. The Anthropocene Reviewed. Give me your five-word review. Kevin: Hmm... "Humanity: It's weird. Four stars." Michael: That's perfect. Mine is: "Finding hope in strange places." Kevin: I like that. It’s a book that’s hard to pin down, but both of those feel right. It’s funny, it’s heartbreaking, it’s deeply philosophical about the most random things. Michael: And that's exactly what we're diving into today: John Green's The Anthropocene Reviewed. What's fascinating is that this book, his first major work of nonfiction and a Goodreads Choice Award winner, grew out of a podcast and his very personal decision to stop writing 'in code' through fictional characters and instead, to write directly about his own life and anxieties. Kevin: Right, because for years readers kept thinking his young adult novel characters were him. This was his way of stepping out from behind the curtain and speaking in his own voice. Michael: Precisely. And to really get what he's doing by "reviewing" the human-centered planet, you have to understand the personal crisis that started it all. It’s a story that begins with him, a shovel, and a desperate need to build a path in his backyard.

Kevin: A path? That seems like a pretty normal homeowner project. Where does the crisis come in? Michael: Well, it was less a project and more an obsession. After a grueling book tour, he spent a month, ten to twelve hours a day, digging this path through the woods behind his house. He was clearing invasive species, laying bricks, pouring wood chips—just this intense, all-consuming physical labor. Kevin: Okay, I can see how that might be a way to decompress. A bit extreme, but I get it. Michael: Exactly. He finishes this path, which takes him only 58 seconds to walk, and a week later, he's hit with a sudden, severe case of vertigo. He's diagnosed with labyrinthitis, an inner-ear infection that leaves him dizzy, disoriented, and basically trapped inside his own head for weeks. Kevin: Whoa. That sounds terrifying. To go from that intense physical control to having absolutely none. Michael: It was. And in that quiet, spinning room, he had this profound realization. For years, he’d been writing about his life, his anxieties, his obsessive thoughts, but always through the filter of fictional characters. He was writing in code. And he decided he didn't want to do that anymore. He wanted to write directly about what it felt like to be him, living on this planet. Kevin: And that’s where the reviews come in? It still feels like a bit of a leap from a medical crisis to rating sunsets on a five-star scale. Michael: It is, but there's a beautiful connection. His wife, Sarah, gave him the key. He'd written a few detached, third-person reviews of things like Canada geese, kind of like his old job reviewing books for Booklist. And she told him, "In the Anthropocene, there are no disinterested observers; only participants." She said reviews are a form of memoir. Kevin: I love that. That’s a fantastic insight. It’s like you can't be an objective reviewer of your own family or your own life. You're in it. Your perspective is the whole point. Michael: That's the heart of the entire book. The five-star rating isn't a gimmick; it's a framework for him to be a participant observer. It forces him to grapple with his own relationship to the thing he's reviewing. When he gives Plague a one-star review, he’s not rating the bacterium. He’s rating the human experience of plague—the fear, the loss, the way it exposes our worst and sometimes our best instincts. Kevin: Okay, that makes so much more sense. It’s not about objective quality, it’s about subjective experience. It’s a review of what it feels like to be a human interacting with this thing. Michael: Exactly. He’s trying to follow the advice of his late friend, the writer Amy Krouse Rosenthal, who said, "PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT YOU PAY ATTENTION TO." And in doing so, he’s trying to fall in love with the world, not by ignoring its suffering, but by looking right at it and choosing to care anyway.

Kevin: Okay, so I get the framework. But let's get to the weird stuff, because that's where the magic of this book really is. You mentioned Diet Dr. Pepper. How on earth do you write a profound essay about a zero-calorie soda? Michael: By treating it with the same seriousness you'd treat a historical event, because for him, it is a part of his personal history. He starts with the fact that Dr. Pepper is utterly artificial. It’s not based on a natural flavor like cola or lemon-lime. A U.S. court even had to classify it as a "pepper soda," a category of one. It was invented by a chemist in 1885 who was trying to capture the smell of a soda fountain, not the taste of a fruit. Kevin: That’s a great detail. It was born artificial. Michael: Completely. And Diet Dr. Pepper is even more so, a chemical facsimile of an already artificial thing. And Green connects this to his own life. He says he drinks it as a minor vice, a small, relatively harmless act of self-destruction that satisfies a craving he’s had since he quit smoking cigarettes. It’s this little nod to the abyss that he can control. Kevin: Wow. I will never look at my afternoon diet soda the same way again. He’s reviewing his own relationship with addiction and mortality, through the lens of a beverage. That’s brilliant. Michael: It’s a perfect example of the review as memoir. But he takes it even further when he looks at something like a video game. He has an amazing essay on Super Mario Kart. Kevin: A classic. I spent hundreds of hours on that game. Michael: Then you know about the question boxes, the power-ups. You get mushrooms for speed, shells to throw at people. But Green points out this one crucial, almost philosophical design choice in the game. Kevin: What is it? Michael: The items you get are not truly random. The game's code gives the best items to the players who are doing the worst. If you're in first place, you'll probably get a useless coin or a single green shell. But if you're in last place? You might get a Star for invincibility, or even the Lightning Bolt that shrinks every other player on the track. Kevin: Whoa. I never consciously thought about that, but it's completely true. It’s a comeback mechanic. Michael: Exactly. And Green’s insight is that this is the polar opposite of how the real world works. In real life, the people in first place get all the best power-ups. If you're wealthy, the bank waives your ATM fees. If you're already successful, you get more opportunities. The system is designed to help the winners win more. Kevin: That's... a stunningly clear way to explain structural inequality. He's saying real life gives power-ups to the people already in the lead. Mario Kart is actually a more just system than capitalism. Michael: That's the argument! He says that for him, real fairness isn't about a pure meritocracy where the most skilled person always wins. Real fairness is when everyone has a shot to win, even if they haven't been playing the game since 1992. It's this beautiful, accessible way of thinking about justice, all found within a 16-bit video game.

Michael: And this idea of seeing systems and meaning in unexpected places extends to how he looks at history and art. It’s about how the meaning of a single moment is constantly being reshaped by what comes after. He explores this beautifully in his essay on the Lascaux cave paintings. Kevin: The ones in France? I know they’re incredibly old, but what’s the story there? Michael: The story of their discovery is almost as amazing as the paintings themselves. It’s September 1940. The Nazis occupy France. And four teenagers are out walking a dog named Robot, who disappears down a hole in the ground. The boys, thinking it might be a secret passage to a nearby manor, return a few days later, widen the hole, and descend with a single oil lamp. Kevin: Wow, to find something so ancient in a moment of such modern horror. That's incredible. Michael: And what they find are these breathtaking, 17,000-year-old paintings of aurochs, horses, and stags. But Green focuses on something even more intimate: the hand stencils. These are outlines of human hands, made by our distant ancestors blowing pigment over their own hands pressed against the cave wall. For Green, these stencils are a message across millennia. They say, "I was here. You are not new." It’s this profound connection to our shared, fragile, and temporary humanity. Kevin: That gives me chills. It collapses time. That person is reaching out from the deep past and basically saying, "We're the same. We were here." Michael: And what makes it even more poignant is that we can no longer see the real thing. The cave was closed to the public in the 1960s because the carbon dioxide from human breath was destroying the art. We have to experience it through replicas. We are separated from that past, just as we are connected to it. Kevin: That’s the core of it, isn't it? The meaning of the moment isn't just in the moment itself. It's in the before and the after. The joy of the discovery is shadowed by the war, and the beauty of the art is shadowed by its eventual inaccessibility. Michael: Precisely. He makes a similar point with a photograph called Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance. It's a picture taken by August Sander in 1914 of three dapper young men in suits, walking down a muddy country road, full of confidence and swagger. They look like the protagonists of their own story. Kevin: But it’s 1914. Michael: It’s 1914. And when you know that, the photograph becomes almost unbearable to look at. You know the Great War is about to consume their world. You know that at least one of them, August Klein, will die in that war just a year later. The photograph captures their hope, but we, the viewers from the future, see only the coming tragedy. Kevin: It’s like looking at pictures of friends and family from January of 2020. You see the joy, the closeness, the lack of masks, and it feels like a different world. The pandemic completely changes the meaning of that image. Michael: Exactly. The photo itself hasn't changed, but we have. The world has. And that’s what Green does so masterfully. He shows us that we are constantly reviewing and re-rating our own pasts, our own lives, through the lens of an ever-changing present.

Kevin: So when you put it all together—the personal crisis, the reviews of soda and video games, the reflections on ancient art—what’s the big takeaway? What is he really trying to tell us? Michael: I think the book is, at its heart, a powerful argument against cynicism. In an age of information overload and constant crisis, it's so easy to become detached, to believe that nothing matters. Green is arguing for the opposite. He’s arguing that paying attention is a radical act of hope. Kevin: That what we choose to look at, and how we look at it, is what gives life meaning. Michael: Yes. The book isn't just a collection of quirky reviews; it's a manual for how to pay attention. He’s saying that our capacity for wonder is not a finite resource. We can find it everywhere—in the taste of a hot dog, in the kindness of a stranger, in the shade of a sycamore tree. But we have to be willing to be vulnerable to it. We have to choose to look for it. Kevin: It’s a choice to love the world, not because it’s perfect, but because it’s ours. And we are participants, not observers. We're all in the frame of the picture. Michael: That’s it exactly. The book is a profound invitation to find the beauty and meaning in our messy, contradictory, and often heartbreaking human-centered world. Kevin: It makes you wonder, what in your own life would you give a five-star review to, not because it's perfect, but because it's deeply, complicatedly yours? Michael: That's a great question. And it’s one we’d love for our listeners to think about. What's your five-star review of the Anthropocene? Find us on our socials and let us know. We’d genuinely love to hear your answers. Kevin: This is Aibrary, signing off.